John Nolan/Times photo
Steve Taylor, a New Hampshire Humanities Council speaker gave a delightful talk on one-room school houses to Farmington Historical Society, recently.

FARMINGTON — Steve Taylor, New Hampshire’s former Commissioner of Agriculture, is a much sought after speaker on the historical society circuit, and has given talks on sheep, cows and the Grange movement. Earlier this month he returned to Farmington to present his latest body of research, which is based on the state’s one-room school houses, that proliferated between 1880 and the end of World War IHe started out with his own memories of such a school that he attended in Cornish as a first-grader in 1945.“We had a fantastic teacher, Eva Bernard. The eighth-grade boys were responsible for the fire, and the seventh-grade boys fetched the water. We used to fold wax paper into a triangle and make a cone. That was our drinking cup for the week,’ he recalled.She also operated a ‘good English” club, having written down the bad grammar that she overheard at recess.“If someone said ‘I ain’t got no coat on’ she would explain the double negative,” he said.Then Taylor moved to the focus of his talk, and explained how he tackled his research.“There was not much state information until 1925. Things were too spread out, so I was told to go to old town reports and town histories,” said Taylor.He said that the romance of the one-room school house had some truth attached to it, but also a lot of myth. “Some aspects were pretty shocking, but they did the best they could,” he said, noting that the idea of universal education, in the 1800s was “a radical, democratic ideal.”The advantages of the one-room school house were that they were all local and within walking distance for the students, that the setting was intimate, and that the building also served as a community center and was a focus of social life.“This was very important at a time when rural areas were losing population,” Taylor said.“The Civil War cleaned out a generation of young men, and people went to work in the mills. Some rural towns lost 80 percent of their population.. Many lost 40 to 50 percent, and much of their tax base,” he saidThen he turned to the “reality.”“Every town was organized into districts. My town had 16. Each district had a committee with the power of the purse. In my town, in District 4, the committee was the one guy for 35 years. He was despot. A teacher let her kids go two hours early on the last day and he docked her pay,” said Taylor.The Consolidation Law of 1885 ushered in some changes.“It made women fully fledged voters on school districts affairs, and they could run for (school district) office. Giving women greater clout improved schools,” said Taylor.The state also set standards for the school building, but not for education.“Around 1900, thanks to the influence of the Grange organization, each school had to stay open at least 20 weeks. The legislature also passed a law that allowed students to be moved to a centralised school. The consolidation movement took 70 or 80 years to accomplish this goal,” said Taylor with a smile.He said there was great disparity in financial support for one-room schools, for a school in a village had a tax base of mills and stores, whereas a school on the mountain could only tax a few farms and tended to be in a state of disrepair.“The difference in tax base issue continued to bubble. The Grange said ‘Equalization of opportunity,’” said Taylor. Pressure from the Grange, which was a very influential organization 100 years ago, lead to a annual appropriated by the state of $25,000 to help poor school districts.

“This was soon cut to $10,000,” chuckled Taylor. Schools were often moved, in the late 1800s, to locations that better served the rural population.“There were no power lines. They just moved them on rollers with oxen,” said Taylor.“Wood supply was a common debate. One town had three articles … one for a bid on supply, one for a bid on splitting the wood, and one for a bid for stacking the wood. It was more like a jobs program,” said Taylor.Subjects taught in the one-room school houses typically included arithmetic, geometry, grammar, penmanship, philosophy and physiology, which had to include the effects of alcohol and stimulants. This indicated the influence of the temperance movement at that time.“It is estimated there were 60,000 drunkards in New Hampshire in 1883 — one in every seven people,” said Taylor.Students had to supply their own text books, which tended to be hand-me-downs from older siblings.A review committee would ask students to recite, and some subsequent reports “were enormously negative,” Taylor found in his research.Teachers were mostly women, and there tended to be a constant turnover due to the low pay.“Women earned two-thirds of a man’s pay. A woman who had 37 students earned $1,900 in a year, while a man with only 12 students was given $2,900,” said Taylor, citing an instance he had uncovered. He found the average age of a teacher in a one-room school house was only 19.He also read that one female teacher, aged only 15, was thrown out of a school window by male students who were older than her.“Discipline varied. Some schools were chaotic. Some were ruled with an iron fist,” said Taylor.After World War I, he said things began to smooth out, with teachers being better prepared for the profession. The arrival of the automobile helped the consolidation of schools, a process that continued, he said, into the 1970s.“Cornish Fair,” he noted, “ was started to finance the plans for a central school.”Taylor said there was an ongoing debate on the value of education. Some thought it was of dubious value for children destined to work on a farm, while others that there was a need for education in a changing world. Likewise, there was a continuous debate on the virtues of consolidation — that still goes on today, said Taylor. Croydon (in Sullivan County), Taylor said, claims to have the longest continuously used one-room school house in the United States. Nowadays, there is also a portable classroom, but it is not attached.After Taylor’s talk wound up, there was some contributions from the audience, including a memory shared by Prisco DiPrizio, now a Rochester resident, who was born and raised in Middleton.He recalled his one-room school house’s wood stove and outside toilet, and noted that the building he was educated in, as a child, was near the lumber yard. Later it was moved and incorporated into part of the old town hall.His wife, Lois, said that she was a student in a one-room school house on Meaderboro Road, which, today, is a small residential home.